Addressing the climate emergency: Interview with Cllr Katherine Dunne, London Borough of Hounslow

In this interview, LGIU’s Caitlin Lord speaks to Cllr Katherine Dunne of the London Borough of Hounslow. Catherine has served Hounslow for 11 years and is currently the cabinet member for climate, environment and transport. Cllr Dunne shared her thoughts on her background, Hounslow’s Climate Emergency Action Plan, and her hopes for Hounslow and the wider sector.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube here.

Looking for just the highlights? A written version of the interview has been edited down into a Q&A format, which you can read below.

Can you tell us a bit about how you started in local government?

I’m a member of the Labour Party and a Labour Party councillor. I got involved in Labour Party politics as a student, but I didn’t do too much activism until I moved to Ireland and joined the Irish Labour Party. I was quite active there, campaigning about women’s rights and representation in politics in particular. When I moved back to the UK, I knew I wanted to do more in politics, and the local area seemed a great place to start.

I moved to Isleworth in the London Borough of Hounslow and got involved in the local area. I managed to get selected as a council candidate and got elected in 2024, feeling young and hopeful that I could make a difference.

Do you think that your scientific background has influenced your local policy priorities and decision-making style?

So I did a degree and a PhD in chemistry for context and some laboratory-based research, and it has to some extent influenced my style. I like to know the facts and see the evidence, and use that to help me make decisions. I tend to be a fairly deliberative decision maker. I want to have all the facts and different perspectives because, even in science, things aren’t always clear cut – you have to synthesise evidence to drum up your understanding of what’s going on. And to some extent, that’s the same in politics.

Obviously, other things come into it like your particular values, the type of society that you’d like to see. You have to take into account that not everyone sees things the same as you, and others have different ideas on how they want their local area run, so you may not get your own personal solution, but something practical that serves the majority of residents.

You have to take people’s emotions on board and people do have very strong emotions when you’re asking them to change the way that they live their lives. But having the data to back up why you’re doing what you’re doing is really important and helps to steer a path through some of that emotion.

Can you tell us about Hounslow’s climate emergency action plan and other work that the council’s doing to tackle climate change?

We declared a climate emergency in 2019, around the time other councils and decision-making bodies were. We wanted to do our bit and have a statement of intent to say we understand there’s an emergency and that we’re going to have to take certain actions. But after that, of course, comes the hard part.

That’s actually figuring out what we have to do to reduce our carbon emissions and reach our target of net zero emissions from council operations by 2030. Then, influencing a reduction in the wider borough to meet UK net zero targets by 2050. But that was 2019, and we’re now in 2025, so there’s still a lot to be done but we’ve learnt a lot in that time.

In developing our climate emergency action plan, we involved residents of the borough, businesses, student groups, and schools. That was really important to me, because thinking about climate action for me is thinking about the future and the world we’re leaving for the next generations. So involving school children in our plans was so important just to understand how they felt about it all, what they already understood and how easy it would be for them to think about living in a different world. One thing that came across is just how enthusiastic and hopeful they are for their future, and their want to make a difference. They want to stop doing things that are polluting our planet and that will cause future issues.

We did this in 2019, and developed and published our plan in 2020. This is of course when the pandemic hit, so it was a time when we were trying new methods of engaging with residents. We were embracing online consultation and trying new methods to get young people engaged.

The plan has three areas: Council/direct emissions (things we control through our operations),  wider/borough emissions, where we’re acting as a leader and convener locally to encourage everyone, including the national government, to do what’s needed to get us to net zero, and making our borough resilient to the impacts of climate change.

Can you tell us a bit about the Net-Zero Neighbourhoods program and how it was created?

When we think about emission reduction, it can sound quite dry and number-focused. But at the end of the day, it’s about people as well. And that’s where Net Zero Neighbourhoods comes in, which is about improving places where people live and the quality of homes. Ensuring that people have cheaper bills, warmer homes, and greener, more connected neighbourhoods. So it’s a very holistic approach, but one that understands the cost of these measures. It would probably cost around £5 billion to get the whole borough to net zero, money the council certainly doesn’t have, and then there’s the cost of retrofitting homes, which can be very costly and prohibitive. So the area neighbourhood approach is about bringing in both public and private financial investment into Hounslow.

It’s a new financial model, very different from what councils have done in the past. We still have our traditional budgeting and money-raising approaches, but if we’re to get the entire borough to net zero, then we need to bring in additional private investment to go towards the cost of making changes to buildings. There’ll also be a payback mechanism overtime for councils and homeowners, so they’ll benefit from having better homes and cheaper bills.

Was that new model easy to bring in, or have there been challenges?

It’s a program that’s still in its infancy, really. We did lots of public engagement in the areas where we first trialled it to better understand what people want and what we’re attempting to do. We also involved professional organisations who were adept at engaging with people. It’s been quite a learning curve for us.

Can you summarise the key programmes in your Climate Emergency Action Plan?

Our key programmes focus on decarbonising our buildings and transport. When we look at council emissions, the two main sources are buildings and council fleets. We have to make buildings as energy efficient as possible by generating as much of our own energy as we can. We’re doing this through the use of solar panels, insulation, LED lighting and heat pumps. These help reduce demand and move us away from gas-powered heating. The council fleet encompasses all the vehicles we use for housing repairs, in our park, but also our big recycling lorries. We need to be using electric vehicles, really.

When the electricity grid is decarbonised, ultimately, those will be zero carbon. So those are the two big programmes for council emissions, but we have another on influencing the supply chain for goods and services, and using our policies to do that. When we look at the wider borough, again we see it’s about buildings and transport. The largest single source of carbon emissions in the borough is road transport, hence why we’re so keen on encouraging practical travel uptake. Providing that infrastructure – cycle lanes, safe walking routes, accessible public transport and stations, electric buses, etc – is so important.

We’re also encouraging the uptake of electric vehicles. We have a scheme to roll out charge points so people making the switch can charge their vehicles. When it comes to buildings, we have our Net Zero Neighbourhoods programme, which will bring in private and public investment to retrofit homes and other buildings throughout the borough.

In another exciting project, we hope to develop a heat network that will use waste heat from our local sewage works, which is currently wasted but we can use to heat people’s homes in an environmentally friendly way. We also do what we can to promote grants that are available to homeowners to improve their homes as well, and we’re ensuring that new buildings are as environmentally friendly as possible from the outset to avoid any future retrofitting. We’re ensuring that when we are building council homes they’re up to the highest standards and have the lowest carbon emissions possible.

Finally, we have a community energy fund, available to community groups, faith groups, and similar organisations in the borough to decarbonise their own buildings via solar, retrofitting, insulation and so on.

What do you think are the priorities and the future for London’s active travel network?

I’m really, really proud of what we’ve achieved in Hounslow on active travel, and I think we still need to do a lot more. Active travel, be it walking, cycling or wheeling, is ideally suited for short journeys, especially within London boroughs. But we know that lots of shorter journeys are still done by car, and being an outer London borough, we still have a relatively high car ownership. We recognise that a lot of people have very good reasons to need a car, like travelling for work, yet we also want to reduce car ownership to reduce congestion, and make use of the space currently used for parking. But you have to be realistic and understand that, certainly for the foreseeable future, people are still going to own cars. Everyone, though, can reduce some of that reliance on private car use. Active travel, it’s not just about reducing carbon emissions and particulates, it’s also about people’s health. Too many people are not being as active as they should be, and we know this country has issues in our public health in terms of obesity, disease, and all sorts of conditions that could be prevented with more active travel. Plus, lots of our journeys could be multimodal, like walking to the tube and then taking that for a bit then walking at the other end. It’s about mixing it up and making sure people have options and are using an appropriate form of transport for their journey. We’ve got a great e-bike hire scheme in Hounslow, which means people without a place to keep their own bike can stil cycle or use a bike as part of a more modal journey.

But we need to ensure that our public transport is as accessible as it can be. We work with Network Rail and Transport for London to ensure accessibility in our stations. As a council, we actually helped at my local station last year by investing a million pounds for new lifts.

Safety is also paramount. We know people don’t always feel safe cycling on the railroads, so it’s really important we’re putting in the infrastructure to make it safer for people to cycle, which we have done. We installed cycleway nine, which comes through Chiswick and goes down to Brentford, and we also offer cycle training for adults and children to ensure people feel confident and safe on the roads.

You spent several years in Ireland campaigning on gender quotas and abortion rights before returning to the UK. How has that experience shaped your advocacy and work in Hounslow?

Campaigning is great. But being in the driver seat and being the person able to make changes is even better. And that’s what drives me to continue now. It’s why I embrace campaigners and people who tell me I could be doing better sometimes or we could be doing better as a council. You need to understand the problems to be in the positions to enact policy and changes. And that’s how the experience of being a campaigner has influenced me, because I try to think I was the campaigner, what would I be telling myself I should be doing better, and then how can I do that? Also, it helped me to learn to listen to people who may be on a different side of an argument to my natural position.

Did you find there was a bit of a learning curve stepping in as an elected representative for the first time and keeping pace with all of the different challenges? How did you find that transition?

It’s a learning curve, absolutely. For a start, you can’t be a single-issue campaigner and be a politician. As a councillor, although I have a specific role and have done other specific roles in the past, I’m here to serve the whole borough across the breadth of council activities. Of course, I do argue for my portfolio and budgets, but I have to see what else is needed as well. We’ve been in financially constrained times for local government ever since I ws elected: I came in a few years into austerity, and it’s only got more difficult for local government as time has gone on. We’re all now acting in a very financially constrained environment, meaning you absolutely have to understand what is happening across every single portfolio and department across the council, otherwise you can’t create a balanced budget. I can’t spend all our money on solar panels, for instance, as there’s so many competing demands.

What is your vision for Hounslow over the next five years?

So I’m driven by thinking about our environment, but again for me that’s about so much more than counting carbon or how many trees we’ve planted. It’s about providing a holistic, healthy, green borough where our communities can thrive. That’s what it means to me, and I don’t think we can do that without addressing the climate emergency. I see it as absolutely core to everything we do; the link between my portfolio work and the public health portfolio is incredibly strong. My vision is one where we have people who are living long and healthy lives, where we prevent some of the diseases and poor health conditions rather than have to treat them in later life, and we do that by creating an environment conducive and friendly to people living.

If you had a magic wand, what would you change about English local government?

I think one thing that frustrates people, be it me, my residents, or councillors, is the pace of local government. It can seem like things take a long time to get done, and there are various reasons for that. One is that we are democratic, and democracy takes time, as does consultation. But we have to ensure we’re doing everything right, that our work is transparent and accountable. There’s been a real drop in capacity across local government because of years of austerity, so I think we could achieve much more if we weren’t contending with that.

But it’s not a case of saying give us more money, as I think there are different ways in which local government could be funded. The government is now discussing changing some of it, which is great. One of the worst things is where different local authorities have to bid for funding or have to compete against each other to fund things they have to do, like retrofitting our council homes. We’re competing against other boroughs for funding when we and those other councils have to do that. The government is looking at that and have promised to make changes in that area, and if we could fund the things we need to do properly, I think that would make a real difference.